Privacy, security, and memory: an interview with Nick Carr

Ars talks about the political, cultural, and cognitive ramifications of cloud …

On Tuesday of last week, Ars Technica and Wired hosted an invitation-only Smart Salon event on cloud computing at San Francisco's Four Seasons. The roster of attendees and presenters was impressive, and the event featured headliners like author Nick Carr and Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie.

I had a chance to chat with Carr after the event, and our discussion ranged from regulatory challenges for cloud computing to the Web's deeper implications for how we read, write, and think. I've split the interview into two parts, with this first part focusing on the policy and cultural issues, and the second focusing on specific companies and technologies. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. Look for the second part tomorrow.

Privacy and security in the cloud

JS: The panel at the Smart Salon was focused on cloud reliability and security concerns, and other barriers to cloud adoption—policy and regulatory challenges, and that sort of thing. Is there an analog to any of this in the dawn of electricity generation as a public utility? Did people have a similar set of concerns?

NC: Security obviously comes out of the fact that with the cloud you're dealing with information, and that doesn't have an analog when you're talking about electric current, but certainly questions of reliability and dependability and control were very important in the move toward the utility model of electricity. And before that, when gas utilities began to take over lighting in place of candles, there were lots of safety issues because the gas tended to explode a lot.

So whenever you move to a central supply model there are always issues with the very nature of centralization and how problems can affect a whole lot of people or companies, instead of just companies individually when they're each creating whatever service there is.

JS: So then with the regulation question, my understanding of current utilities regulation is that it's based at least in part on some notion of a utility as a public good, which the government would like to guarantee or mandate some level of access to. But it seems like the initial cloud regulatory questions are about consumer protection.

NC: I think there are lots of facets of either actual or potential government regulation or action with the cloud, and one is, I think, the matter of access. The FCC has recently made it pretty clear that it wants to pursue universal broadband access, which is obviously related to the increasing importance of what's in the cloud, and to the communication and economic opportunities it offers. And so, similarly, with the original telephone system, where the government got involved and pushed the utilities to pursue universal service and in many cases used cross subsidies to get telephone service into rural areas, I think we're going to see more talk and thinking about that kind of issue—the universal access issue—for network computing as well. So I think there is that facet.

And then, as you said, most of the attention on the regulation front is about confidentiality and privacy, and protection of personal data. The way that's being regulated varies a great deal from country to country, and that adds a layer of complexity for the suppliers of cloud computing services, who have to toe the legal line in the different geographies.

JS: So how do you see that shaping up in the US, with regard to privacy?

So there's the possibility of a criminal breach that puts cloud information into the wrong hands, and then there's also the question of, will a cloud provider or a big social networking company push the limits too far, and suddenly force privacy up the public agenda.

NC: It's really hard to predict, because, generally speaking in the US—compared to Europe—there's been much more of a laissez faire attitude and fewer privacy controls. And my guess is that the big issue is whether there's some large-scale breach of privacy in the future that creates a big public outrage. If that happens, then I think government will get much more involved in this, and will begin to apply some laws and regulations about privacy from the top down.

On the other hand, if that doesn't happen, and concerns about privacy remain fairly sporadic, as they have been up until now, I think there's a fairly good chance that the government won't get heavily involved in questions of data security. I think it could go either way, depending on the events that happen and how they influence public attitude. It's a big question mark.

JS: With all of the laptop thefts and the data breaches that we've had, I'm trying to envision a category of events that would be sufficient in size to generate that kind of outrage. And the only thing that really occurs to me is healthcare records—if there was a major cloud data breach in the healthcare area. Can you think of another... I'm just trying to envision a concrete example of the scale of a privacy breach that's connected to the cloud that would spur this kind of action. Because we've had quite a few high-profile breaches... they kind of come with this numbing regularity.

NC: That's right. They do come with a numbing regularity, and they cross our attention span briefly, because even if the numbers seem to be large, the actual percentage of people affected seems to be quite small. So it never causes large-scale public outrage.

So I think there are two different aspects to the question. One is the criminal aspect—what happens if the bad guys get a huge amount of health or financial information, or whatever sensitive information. But there's also the aspect of changes in mores about privacy itself. Recently, for instance, Facebook's fairly determined effort to break down people's worries about privacy is an example of a company trying to push the limits, so far without huge repercussions—although what's happened in the past couple of weeks is a bigger reaction than Facebook has seen in the past.

So there's the possibility of a criminal breach that puts cloud information into the wrong hands, and then there's also the question of, will a cloud provider or a big social networking company push the limits too far, and suddenly force privacy up the public agenda. So far, neither of those things has happened in a way that really leads to government action, but there's nothing to say that that kind of scenario couldn't play out in the future.

Cloud, memory, capitalism, and The Shallows

JS: I'd like to talk a bit about your upcoming book, The Shallows, which I'm planning to read. My own background is that I'm a dangling humanities PhD in early church history and Christian origins. After Ken Fisher and I sold the company in May of 2008, I now just do Ars full-time, and after the first year of that I definitely noticed a pretty large change in my attention span. So at one point last year I deliberately started reading more offline, long-form content like books, because I felt like the quality of my writing and my thinking was so degraded by the information flow online. Reading some classic fiction and nonfiction has definitely helped me to feel sane again.

NC: I've had a very similar experience. When I wrote this new book, The Shallows, I definitely throttled back on my connectivity. I closed down my Facebook and Twitter accounts, and I tried to limit my checking of e-mail to a couple of times a day. And I did other things—I moved to a place where there was no cell phone connectivity or texting. And it definitely made a difference. You regain a certain calmness of mind that allows you to read a long book without hopping up every other page to check e-mail or do some Googling. I think it really underscored what I had begun to fear, which is that I and a lot of other people are really training our brains to skim and scan all the time, and along the way we're forgetting how to slow down and read or think deeply and be contemplative.

So that's really what the book is about—trying to look at my personal experience and that of others, and to look at both the history of human intellect as well as recent neuroscientific discoveries about how the brain adapts and how it works, and to use those things to shed light on what's going on.

The rich allusions that used to be considered the cornerstone of good writing have been transformed into easy links.

JS: You may talk about this in the book—I don't know—but Roland Barthes describes how, after the rise of print production as a business under capitalism, books began to be made with the assumption that they would be read or consumed only once; and then you move on and you read another book. Whereas, in previous eras, if anything was worth writing down or copying, then people sort of lived with the resulting texts and read them and reread them. Even personal correspondence was reread many times. But there was this shift in the print era, when books became a commodity, to this cultural conception of a book as something that you read one time. In other words, when the book becomes a commodity, a reader becomes a consumer. Barthes tries to draw out the implications of this shift for readers and writers, and how it affects the way that readers read and writers write.

So you had that dislocation with the printing press and the rise of print as a business, and now it seems that we're seeing a similar kind of dislocation going on, where we've moved from reading something deeply just once, to, like you said, a skim-and-scan practice. Everybody does this rapid reading thing. I know I do it, and all of our editors on the site are pretty well-trained... in fact, anybody who works in this space can read and digest a lot of information really rapidly, as long as it's written in a certain way. Sometimes, if you read a text that was obviously written under the presumption that your'e going to sit down and spend time with it, you just get annoyed because you want the writer to get to the point.

NC: That's right. And I talk a little bit about how those expectations on the part of readers inevitably begin to change the way writers write. The danger is that we lose a sense of literary experimentation, of taking chances, of trying to do new things, and we just fall back on a bland, utilitarian approach to writing that fits the way we prefer writing when we're surfing the Web, where, you're absolutely right—if you suddenly get an essay from Emerson or something, you're sort of like, "What the heck? This does not compute."

Any of these technological alterations in reading media also echo back and ultimately change the way people write, as well. And not necessarily always for the better.

JS: Yeah, I feel like I can almost tell when somebody starts writing online and they're fresh out of school, where they spent a lot of time with books. That shows in their writing—in the pace of it, in the references they make. They reach back into cultural memory for references instead of referring to something that's more lateral and ephemeral. It's a shame that we no longer reach backwards into cultural memory [as opposed to sideways], and that I certainly don't do that. Because it used to be a mark of good style—and I guess it still is, in some circles—to be able to reference, for instance, the Illiad. It's funny, because you have an infinite word count to play with, but you just don't have the time to work in an Illiad reference capably, and the reader doesn't have the time to process it or care about it.

NC: Yes, the rich allusions that used to be considered the cornerstone of good writing have been transformed into easy links.

JS: Pretty much. And it's an irony that the cloud is this giant pool of shared memory, and the way that we use it ends up being almost anti-mnemonic in a weird way. It sort of eats away at our cultural memory and at our individual recall.

NC: There's a chapter in the book called "Search Memory" that talks about that. I completely agree. I think that's exactly the danger we face here. Both personality and culture hinge on the development of a richly connected individual memory. And to the extent that we begin to see that as unnecessary because we have such easy access to so much information, I think leads to a less interesting culture as well as less distinctive personalities.

26 Reader Comments

I quite associated with the last few observations in the article. I had to stop myself from skimming them! I've noticed that I started skimming comments in the forums (here and elsewhere) because of the massive amount of information, and that translated into learning to skim important pieces of emails and articles as well, and that is become a real tragedy for me.

On the other hand I'm reading the Illiad, and whereas I am not skimming, I am getting really tired of reading about all the ways a bronze spear can kill a man!

I want to thank you for posting an article like this where I have had to re-read several lines to make sure I understood what it is that is being said. I miss not having critical thinking pieces that delve into the meat of the issue. Even if the majority of readers on this sight would not prefer having such a rich piece referring back to cultural classics, I would still like to see a piece once in a while catering to this. Thank you very much. ^_^

I write a little bit creatively for personal benefit. I find myself disappointed in the fact that my short stories or fragments aren't longer, more well thought out. It seems like, in my head, they are much more rich stories that want to come out, but it's a challenge to sit down and type it all out without speeding through to get to the next task, next plot device, or ending.

It's interesting to see that my work in IT might be contributing to that (I've been in support for 15 years). Today it seems it's having to do with literary work, but what about coding? Wouldn't some of the same deep thought processes be involved to try to overcome obstacles or bugs in the code? It would be interesting to see a comparison, if one could even perform one, of the quality of code from years ago to today.

Roland Barthes describes how, after the rise of print production as a business under capitalism, books began to be made with the assumption that they would be read or consumed only once; and then you move on and you read another book. Whereas, in previous eras, if anything was worth writing down or copying, then people sort of lived with the resulting texts and read them and reread them. Even personal correspondence was reread many times. But there was this shift in the print era, when books became a commodity, to this cultural conception of a book as something that you read one time. In other words, when the book becomes a commodity, a reader becomes a consumer. Barth tries to draw out the implications of this shift for readers and writers, and how it affects the way that readers read and writers write.

I think this is far too reductive and simplistic. There are elements of truth to it, and it may even roughly describe the broader trends, but let's not forget that, before the printing press gained significant traction, "reading" was hardly a universal skill (and it's not now, either, but it was much less so then). Many people couldn't read.

This "before the printing press, we were better readers / better writers" nostalgia strikes me as simply "good old days" feeling at its most uncritical and uninteresting. For example, what would our world look like without newspapers? Newspapers are impossible without a printing press, and "commodity texts." Broad education would be much more difficult without the printing press.

Similarly, this "before the Internet / cloud, we were better readers / writers" also seems like "good old days" nostalgia. Certainly, the Internet (and the printing press) changed the ways we read and write, but looking at it through a single lens seems (please pardon, as I mean no offense) lazy. I hope that Nick Carr's book provides more depth, multivariance, and critical analysis than the interview suggests. I think the cloud certainly has affected our reading and writing skills, but "skimming" merely scrapes the surface.

Many people still read and reread texts, and reread personal correspondence. I may not always read Ulysses and The Odyssey, but then, neither did most people *before* the Internet.

Of course, there is also to consider that this was a recorded conversation, and expecting that to rise to the level of a written analysis may be unreasonable.

b-ape, I think it would be interesting to see a study on whether brain function seems to be affected by different ways of reading. Shoot, and now that I've said that, I can't remember whether I've seen one or not. There certainly seems to be enough anecdotal evidence that I've read about to suggest it may be an issue and not just nostalgia, but it's still only anecdotal evidence.

I am so excited to discover that some of the writers here are literature people as well--I started reading for all the great technical posts, and I just keep finding new things about Ars to enjoy.

I really don't like the idea of waiting for a massive security/privacy disaster to occur instead of being proactive about the possibility. I would prefer to see some reasonable regulations now to at least fend off some of the larger potential disasters because something is bound to happen eventually. It will be less costly and less painful to do something wise about that now instead of later.

b-ape, I think it would be interesting to see a study on whether brain function seems to be affected by different ways of reading. Shoot, and now that I've said that, I can't remember whether I've seen one or not. There certainly seems to be enough anecdotal evidence that I've read about to suggest it may be an issue and not just nostalgia, but it's still only anecdotal evidence.

I didn't mean to imply that there was no difference; quite the opposite, I assume there is a difference unless someone could prove otherwise. My point was that, of all the analysis one could perform on the idea of "the cloud is changing the way we read / write," the "it's making us read / write worse, less reflective" etc. analysis seems based more on nostalgia than any real analysis.

Edit: That's not very clear. I'm trying to express that I think they didn't really say very much about reading or writing and how the Internet affects them beyond touching the idea of skimming without any actual analysis of any of the behaviors in question. Jon brought up Barthes' very interesting observations on the effects of the printing press, but that doesn't actually say anything about what's happening now.

I think this is far too reductive and simplistic. There are elements of truth to it, and it may even roughly describe the broader trends, but let's not forget that, before the printing press gained significant traction, "reading" was hardly a universal skill (and it's not now, either, but it was much less so then). Many people couldn't read.

There's a fairly large amount of literature on this topic, and I'm happy to put some bibliography up here if you're interested in learning more about it.

Data on literacy rates in most eras before very recently is quite hard to come by. But it's clear that there are two types of literacy: reading literacy and writing literacy. In other words, reading and writing are two quite separate skills, and there's evidence to suggest that people from across the social spectrum have been widely able to do the former, while the training for the latter has historically been restricted to elite males.

Anyway, Barthes is not some guy mouthing off in a dorm room somewhere about this. There has been considerable work done in this area since the 60's, and he's quite right that almost everything about what it means to read--who reads, when they read, why they read, whether they read silently or aloud, whether they read alone or in a group setting, etc.--has changed radically in the past 200 years, and especially in the past 100 years.

Millions of Veterans Affairs Hospital records with silly things like social security records seem to go missing all the time... But that has yet to cause a major outrage, so it would really have to be a catastrophic event like someone burning down the credit bureaus! I'm sure that would get people (big business) angry and some support from Washington.

Jon, thank you for your response. I'm always interested in bibliography, but don't let my interest or lack thereof impel you. I don't know that I'd read anything you added (at least not in the near future...my reading list is longer than I'd like, and I rarely have income to buy books anymore), but someone else certainly might.

I've never studied historical literacy, but your explanation makes sense. I'd be interested to know how widespread "literature" reading literacy was. How many people read and understood the Bible, I wonder, who were not the cultural elite? Some of it is very simple, elegant, and straightforward, and some of it is not.

I'm aware who Barthes is (having some rather basic sociology and semiotics from my school days, as well as reading some bits and pieces of Mythologies), and I've certainly not intended to challenge the idea that reading -- in all of its social and psychological incarnations -- has changed in response to the cloud. As I said, I think that, as a general trend, it has truth to it. And honestly, I don't really want to argue with Barthes. I was more interested in the conclusions you seemed to be trying to draw (and the attitude you had towards it).

It seemed that you / Mr. Carr were both displaying anxiety over the loss of a cultural memory that a) still exists fairly vibrantly in schools now, and b) even prior to the Internet age, was not particularly vibrant outside of them. In the lack of more substantial analysis, it feels like a "it was better back in the day when we didn't have the Internet."

I think the "skimming"/distraction thing is being somewhat amplified over time, as information technology evolves.

I think it the same thing as all those television set that was on all day in many homes when I grew up (not that long ago). No one was really watching. You read an article, check the feed reader, throw an eye on an irc chat. Attention span of nothing. If it's not worth your complete concentration for more than a few minutes it should probably be skipped altogether.

I have noticed one thing in my own behavioral that worries me a bit. I switch attention either when I feel bored, or worse, when I hit something that is a bit hard. Like writing a comment like this one and hitting a problem in my own argument or line of thought. It's what is hard what is interesting and fun damn it! Just have to get over the effort threshold and don't take the low effort way out via one of countless distractions.

There are things that trumps most distractions (like certain programming problems). I can really feel the difference in mental tiredness after a day _really_ thinking and a day of "normal work". Feels like a waste spending most days mentally idling. I hope I can train myself to do more long attention span thinking.

I think Neal Stephenson has some valid thoughts on the importance of long thoughts in Anathem.

(A lot of "i think" in this comment, i haven't thought about this long enough yet )

And it definitely made a difference. You regain a certain calmness of mind that allows you to read a long book without hopping up every other page to check e-mail or do some Googling. I think it really underscored what I had begun to fear, which is that I and a lot of other people are really training our brains to skim and scan all the time, and along the way we're forgetting how to slow down and read or think deeply and be contemplative.

Hear hear! It seems to me that many of us (including myself at times - very possibly including right now) are playing a game where the goal is a sort of knee-jerk reflexive thing: quickly read some information, mentally summarize, kick back a response. Repeat without rinsing. After x number of these, (where it's possible that x is somehow linked to the Peter Principle, the day is done. Commute home, engage in some relatively passive entertainment (television or a stimulus/response game), sleep it off, and start over.

End results seem to select for a sea of shifting priorities governed by a set of endlessly mutable rules/tactics with few larger strategies truly in evidence. What's the goal? Probably not the same one we had last week. Are we progressing towards goal? Well, who can really tell, given that the goalposts shift so often?

I will be looking forward to a few case studies in The Shallows, to help me understand more objectively whether this process is helpful or harmful in various situations.

Fantastic JS, good read. Definitely will bookmark the tittle for further reading. I'm committing to a more offline kind of lifestyle as well from now on - which fortunately/unfortunately means less gaming.

It reminded me of when I was in middle school going through text books and being encouraged to do the "Critical Thinking" questions. It wasn't that they were hard but because it required thoughtful reading in the first place. Problem with selective reading is while fast and efficient, it works on assumptions of what is important. Without someone/something to challenge those assumptions, you could make yourself "deaf" to even very obvious points. Thank goodness for forums (for people who will challenge your opinions), too bad they are often overblown with drivel.

I really don't like the idea of waiting for a massive security/privacy disaster to occur instead of being proactive about the possibility. I would prefer to see some reasonable regulations now to at least fend off some of the larger potential disasters because something is bound to happen eventually. It will be less costly and less painful to do something wise about that now instead of later.

Too bad that seems to be the mentality that governs a lot of "regulation" in the US re current events.

I think this is far too reductive and simplistic. There are elements of truth to it, and it may even roughly describe the broader trends, but let's not forget that, before the printing press gained significant traction, "reading" was hardly a universal skill (and it's not now, either, but it was much less so then). Many people couldn't read.

There's a fairly large amount of literature on this topic, and I'm happy to put some bibliography up here if you're interested in learning more about it.

Data on literacy rates in most eras before very recently is quite hard to come by. But it's clear that there are two types of literacy: reading literacy and writing literacy. In other words, reading and writing are two quite separate skills, and there's evidence to suggest that people from across the social spectrum have been widely able to do the former, while the training for the latter has historically been restricted to elite males.

Anyway, Barthes is not some guy mouthing off in a dorm room somewhere about this. There has been considerable work done in this area since the 60's, and he's quite right that almost everything about what it means to read--who reads, when they read, why they read, whether they read silently or aloud, whether they read alone or in a group setting, etc.--has changed radically in the past 200 years, and especially in the past 100 years.

3rd reply's a charm! I'd love to see a bibliography, no guarantees I'll read them all right away but certainly for future reference. I'll be happy to email you if you prefer.

Hmm... I remember when I was in grade school and the ability to spell-check a document using a computer was a new and frightening development for teachers. Imagine the horrors of a world in which people rely on machines to spell correctly! And in math class a similar concern regarding calculators was being raised.

But it always seems to be the case that there is another side to the story. When we are not using our brains to do things that machines can do faster and better, we can be using them to do things that machines cannot do well at all.

So if we end up relying on the cloud for more of our memory, what are we using our brains for? What is our comparative advantage relative to the machines? I suspect the answer has to do with advanced pattern recognition. But I would love to read more about this issue from that perspective. Don't get me wrong -- I think that it is important to know what we are losing. But I think it is also important to carefully consider what opportunities exist -- how can we best use this new technology? How can we combine the best of ourselves with the best of the machines?

A lot of what's being said here is based on personal introspection - which makes sense. In doing a little of my own I see another side to all this. I have developed, through necessity, scanning skills that I never had before. The fact is that most of what's out there isn't worth my time - either because I already know it, or I don't need or want to. The same was true before, but the amount of information I had to go through was less.

This scanning ability means that I waste less time on unimportant things. It doesn't cause me to spend less time on the heavy stuff. Because of the cloud, I know a lot more about everything than I did ten years ago, both shallow and deep. It's a paradise out there for somebody who loves to learn on their own.

I'm not a young guy. Today I see more good writing being done - both shallow and deep. And not only writing, but music, art, and knowledge in all its forms. It's true that the old models are crumbling, but in my personal experience the new stuff is much better. It's an exciting time to be alive.

Forgive me if this gets a bit abstract, but I do promise to stay on topic. I'd like to respond to the final exchange of the conversation in which JS and NC agree that, while the cloud pools humanity's collective memory, it concomitantly drains each individual of his or her cultural identity. They conclude that this leaves each of us less distinctive, presumably fading each society's cultural tapestry in the process; our end is cultural bankruptcy. Thus, as we come to rely increasingly on the availability of such an unfathomably deep ocean of knowledge in our daily interactions, our own reservoirs of retained information begin to dry up. The Renaissance Man devolves into an oaf sitting with a glazed over stare in a baby pool of banality.

Personally, my ability to communicate meaningfully has developed asymmetrically along two axes: the instantaneous and the intermittent. I can engage in either form with equal capacity using information I've retained from "long-form books," but when off topic, I'm only fluent in the latter medium. Increasingly, though, I find myself drifting in that more stable direction. As a child I spent hours IMing each day (though I’d refuse to pick up the phone). Today, however, I’ve become disenchanted with the deluge of Facebook and Twitter. I would much prefer to spend an unnecessary amount of time on a single comment to a thoughtful article than I would on an unnecessary amount of comments in the echo chamber of tweets and statuses. When we all begin to suffer from the information overload experienced by JS, NC, and other commenters here, I am confident that we will collectively step away from the edge before diving into that baby pool. We will get bored. We will stop scanning. We will get old, and slow. And most importantly, we will be made rich by the wealth of knowledge we will have amassed.

I'm not saying we're going to suddenly drop this great riding lawnmower we're all strapped into from rabbit straight down to turtle in one fell swoop, but I do think we'll learn to compliment our chatter by plotting a course along that more stable axis.

When we all begin to suffer from the information overload experienced by JS, NC, and other commenters here, I am confident that we will collectively step away from the edge before diving into that baby pool. We will get bored. We will stop scanning. We will get old, and slow. And most importantly, we will be made rich by the wealth of knowledge we will have amassed.

Except that I will have forgotten what you wrote in about 2 minutes.

I find it interesting that pretty much everyone who has posted a comment on this subject has identified the same way. I don't think I have ever witnessed this kind of quorum on a subject on Ars before.

I also find it interesting that the majority of comments are about the skimming topic, and not the security issue. Shows what is important to us, huh?

Thesis: literacy is the hot, new tool of Plato's Greece, setting the kids free by making independent thought possible. But the establishment, known then as the Poets, wants to keep thought locked down through the groupthink/mutual dependence of the oral tradition. Helps to be familiar with The Republic, but still enjoyable if it's been awhile.

[quote=I find it interesting that pretty much everyone who has posted a comment on this subject has identified the same way. I don't think I have ever witnessed this kind of quorum on a subject on Ars before.

I also find it interesting that the majority of comments are about the skimming topic, and not the security issue. Shows what is important to us, huh?[/quote]

It is interesting that the response, even among those who are, theoretically at least, technically savvy is almost exclusively related to the issue of not taking time to understand what we read.

This self-indicting of our own apparent attention span is perhaps related to our inability or unwillingness to recognize a security issue and deal with it before it becomes real. To do so would require the imagination to see the course we plot with our inattention, the wisdom to place a hand on the tiller, a consensus of thought in order to produce action, and the time and will to do something.

If we can't be bothered to complete a book, how can anyone assume we will be bothered to maintain our security, privacy, or freedom?